It's been yet another year!
Twenty twenty-five draws near.
Happy birthday, dear website!
I bring comments, so cheer.

The Cave of Dragonflies is twenty-two years old today. It's been an interesting year for the site - fewer updates than I would have liked, but I'm very fond of all the things I have put up this year. I've had a lot going on, but I'm still hoping to get more site updates in before the end of the year.

For this anniversary, I've added the ability to post comments at the bottom of most pages of the site, as a fun little experiment. This makes it a little easier and more straightforward to comment directly on particular content than when you'd have to do it as a guestbook post or update comment. Behind the scenes, like with update comments, page comments actually just go into the guestbook, to make it easier for me to keep track, but will also appear on their respective pages. Some pages don't have comments, either for technical reasons or because I didn't think it made much sense, but comments being enabled is the default for most text-based pages, which is the vast majority; I may go on to disable comments on particular pages or such going forward, though.

Right now, there aren't threaded replies or anything; I figured there wasn't much reason to get into that before knowing if the feature would even see much use. But I might fiddle with it if it might be neat later.

In the meantime, I'm still hoping to actually adapt some more of those Tumblr posts. That one's been on hold pretty much entirely because almost immediately after the Jolteon article I got distracted by a particularly all-consuming obsession with 1966 Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Over thirty thousand words of rambling later, though, I can probably recover some focus for other things soon.

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I mentioned last time that I wanted to port over some Pokémon-related articles from my personal Tumblr. The first of these is now up, and accidentally became quite a bit more than just a port of my Tumblr post: an essay about my glitched Jolteon. It is part reminiscence and part game mechanics deep-dive about the very special Jolteon that I had on my Yellow version back in the day and my efforts to replicate and investigate his mysterious harmlessly glitchy properties. I hope you all enjoy.

I have placed it under Kanto on the menu for now, but it feels like a little bit of a quirky place for it - I waffled between putting it under Opinions/Theories (possibly renaming that subsection), Kanto or even Game Mechanics given how into the weeds it ends up getting. I guess I will think about it. Feel free to opine.

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So there was this one more little thing I wanted to do for the R/S/E roulette article: when simulating multiple possible fuzz values, I wanted a ball that bounced off an existing slot to split into two balls that would fall to each side. I could imagine what it was supposed to look like, and it'd be neat, and I wanted to do it. The problem was just that with my weird hodgepodge code for a simple fuzz range calculator with the whole animation thing awkwardly bolted on afterwards, this was basically impossible to do. So obviously, I had to rewrite and reorganize the roulette code into something with a little more structure, so that I could do this tiny minor feature nobody but me cared about.

...And then that took a while, because this was a lot of complex code to refactor, and then I had to implement this additional feature, and then I wanted to double-check and polish up various things and fix some minor issues, and then it managed to hit me with the most obnoxious obscure bugs possible, just to torment me when I was sure I was free. But! It's done now! The roulette simulator will now show the ball splitting into two balls if it bounces off an existing ball when you have selected either the "Highest/lowest/medium fuzz" option or the "All possible fuzz values" option. I should now be Actually Done with roulette, fingers crossed. Totally worth it, question mark? Let me know if you bump into anything odd with it.

There are also a couple of other things I have been doing alongside this that got held back or not actually announced at the time thanks to "I'll just quickly finish this roulette thing first oops where did time go":

• I quietly added an RSS feed back in May, which is now a little more visible with an icon in the footer as well as being linked in metadata on every page of the site rather than just the front page. I always had the impression very few people were using RSS feeds much these days, so despite a couple of queries about it over the years I never went ahead and got into implementing it. But then someone offhandedly mentioned it in their tags while reblogging one of my posts on Tumblr, and in a manic coding spree I went and did my best to implement it despite not being very familiar with it and finding it pretty kludgy to put together. Let me know if you have any trouble with it and I will try to figure it out.
• The April Fools' Day joke archive now has a table of contents that makes it easier to find a particular joke, since it's been a lot of years by now.
• When I first made the Pokémon List Generator, the Spanish and Italian localizations of Pokémon simply used the English names unchanged, so I didn't bother including the ability to show names in Spanish or Italian alongside French and German. By now, though, some Pokémon (Type: Null and the Paradox Pokémon from Scarlet and Violet) do have special names in Spanish and Italian, so I've added the ability to specify those as filters for the name variable.
• On May 10th, Morphic turned seventeen years old, and for the occasion I wrote a set of three 100-word drabbles, which are now finally up as an extra (they're not super remarkable, and two out of three only make sense if you've read Groundhog Dave, but they're there). As I was adding that, I also reorganized the list of extras to split it into a few categories, just because it was getting a bit long and unwieldy.

My next plans involve porting over some Pokémon-related articles I wrote on my personal Tumblr that there's really no reason not to give a more permanent, less transient home over here, which should genuinely be fairly straightforward to do and will not take months of labyrinthine programming, so hopefully relatively soon... just as soon as I'm done writing this decidedly not-Pokémon-related essay about medieval Icelandic literature that my brain decided to get obsessed with in June.

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